Coco Chanel at war

On right, Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) accompanied by his son Randolph (1911 - 1968) and Mlle Chanel (1883 - 1971) at a meet of the Duke of Westminster's boar hounds, the 'Mimizan Hunt' near Dampierre, northern France. Photo: GETTY

1937 - Gabrielle Chanel in her suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Published in Harpers Bazaar in 1937 it was chosen for the No 5 advertising campaign. This was the first time Chanel herself promoted her perfume. Photo: FRANCOIS KOLLAR @ MINISTERE DE LA CULTURE, FRANCE

American soldiers standing in front of 31 rue Cambon in 1945. They were buying Chanel No 5 perfume. Photo: SERGE LIDO

In the tangle of tales told about Coco Chanel one accusation is invariably repeated. Chanel was a Nazi collaborator, whose wartime affair with a German officer leaves her reputation blemished, and the legacy of her visionary designs forever stained.

The truth is less clear-cut than that. That Chanel's wartime record is imperfect is a reflection both of her own inconsistencies, and the inconsistent recording of them. But her conduct should also be seen in the context of an era of French history marked by widespread chaos, confusion and uncertainty, as well as terrible tragedy. To acknowledge this is not to act as an apologist for Chanel; and she herself would have been enraged at the very idea, for she declared that she had done nothing wrong in her relationship with a German.

His name was Hans Gunther von Dincklage, and he was 13 years younger than Chanel. She was not blind to the age difference - she was 58 when their affair began - as was implicit in her famous reply, recorded by Cecil Beaton, to the question of whether she had been involved with a German. 'Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.' Von Dincklage was known to his friends as Spatz, the German for sparrow. He was a tall, blond, distinguished-looking attaché to the German embassy in Paris.

Born in Hanover on 15 December 1896, Spatz had arrived in Paris in 1928, where he gained a reputation as a suave playboy. After divorcing his wife in 1935, he had several affairs with smart, rich Parisians, and at some point encountered Mademoiselle Chanel on a social basis, for she claimed to have already known him 'for years' before the start of their affair. As for his professional activities in Paris: to some observers Spatz was simply an affable, occasionally frivolous diplomat; to others, a German spy.

If Spatz's record is ambiguous, then Coco Chanel's is even more baffling. The police archives in Paris contain a large dossier on her, dating back to the 1920s, when she first became a target of suspicion. The intelligence on her was often wildly inaccurate - almost comically so, at times - yet also offers the occasional nugget of information.

At the beginning of 1929, Chanel came under scrutiny, possibly because of her friendship with Vera Arkwright, a well-connected Englishwoman previously employed at rue Cambon as fixer and facilitator, who had introduced Coco to the Duke of Westminster in 1923. Vera and her second husband Colonel Alberto Lombardi were under surveillance as suspected German spies, and by association Chanel was also the subject of investigation.

On 26 January 1929, a report was filed that described Coco as an 'ancienne demimondaine' who had been welcomed into Parisian society, and was now possessed of excellent contacts in the political and diplomatic world. The police intelligence recorded that she had set up in business in 1910, with the help of one of her 'American' friends (presumably an incorrect interpretation of her former English lover Boy Capel's nationality) and that she had been the mistress of the Grand Duke Dmitri from 1921 until 1924.

On 20 January 1931, the Minister of the Interior himself sent a confidential letter to the head of the police service in Paris, ordering a close and discreet surveillance operation into the Lombardis and Chanel. The investigation was to be conducted with extreme vigilance, given 'the nationality of the suspects and the nature of their actions'.

But despite their best efforts, the police came up with little in the way of proof of any wrongdoing. There was also reference, in 1934, to Chanel's friendship with Winston Churchill, whom she had met many times before the war when she was the lover of the Duke of Westminster.

That long-standing friendship was to be of considerable significance to Chanel in the Second World War, as were Vera's relationships with Churchill and Chanel. Both women were to call on Churchill for help, as well as offering their own help to him, which he was unlikely to have required. All three of them were linked, in different ways, by their affection for the Duke of Westminster.

Inevitably, there were times when politics overrode friendship; though Churchill was skilled at navigating the hazardous ground that divided the two. In September 1939, for example, when the Duke of Westminster made a statement opposing the war against Germany, Churchill wrote to him expressing the gravest concern. 'I am sure that pursuance of this line would lead you into measureless odium and vexation.' Churchill did not refer directly to Westminster's membership of The Link (a right-wing, pro-German movement), or to his reputation for anti-Semitism, but he did succeed in bringing him back into line, so that the Duke's patriotism and loyalty were never again questioned.

Churchill continued to see Chanel when he visited Paris, and his visits continued even after the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939. He would have known, therefore, of her decision to close the House of Chanel, as an immediate consequence of the declaration of war. Chanel's decision to shut down her business in September was a controversial one. 'This is no time for fashion,' she declared; an announcement that seems in retrospect acceptable, perhaps even honourable, yet at the time was seen as an act of cowardice and betrayal.

Elsa Schiaparelli, on the other hand, kept her business going. 'I wonder if people fully realised the importance as propaganda for France of the dressmaking business at this time,' wrote Schiaparelli in her memoir,
Shocking Life
, describing couture as 'the opposition of feminine grace to cruelty and hate'.

Several leading fashion designers took the same view, including Molyneux, Lanvin and Lucien Lelong, the head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture (although Christian Dior, who worked for Lelong alongside Pierre Balmain, observed that the couture houses remained open 'as much to provide employment for thousands of workers as out of patriotic pride').

But nothing withstood the German invasion of France in May 1940, and as the soldiers of the Third Reich approached Paris in early June, Schiaparelli joined the great exodus from the city. At the Ritz, Chanel packed her belongings into several trunks, which she stored at the hotel, paid her bill two months in advance, and left for the Pyrénées.

As the summer passed, however, Chanel fretted to return, and eventually conceived a plan to make the homeward journey. In Paris, as soon as she approached the main entrance of the Ritz, she was confronted by the sight of German sentries at the door and uniformed officers in the lobby.

The main part of the hotel, including her suite overlooking place Vendôme, had been requisitioned for senior military personnel and high-ranking Nazis, among them Marshal Goering. After some negotiation, a small bedroom was found for Mademoiselle on the top floor of the rue Cambon wing of the hotel.

Von Dincklage was not sufficiently senior to be billeted at the Ritz, and it may have been elsewhere in the city that Chanel encountered him again. But whatever the circumstances of that meeting, she sought his help in the release of her nephew, André, a French soldier imprisoned in an internment camp.

Spatz was unable to do this but, nevertheless, Chanel embarked on a love affair with him at some point in 1941. Her maid, Germane Domenger, who worked for Chanel from 1937 until 1966, was later outraged by suggestions that this relationship was tantamount to collaboration. 'Mademoiselle refused to reopen her couture house and work with the Germans!' she declared, in a letter she wrote defending Chanel from such accusations after her death in 1971.

Yet Spatz was not the only German that Chanel had dealings with. A catastrophic error of judgement led to her becoming embroiled with another, far more senior Nazi officer - a relationship that would lead to a misguided trip to Madrid, the consequences of which were to prove markedly compromising.

When Spatz proved unable to get Chanel's nephew out of the prisoner-of-war camp, she turned to his friend Captain Theodor Momm for help. But at some point in Chanel's negotiations with Momm, as the war dragged on through 1943, a bizarre plan began to take shape: that she would act as a messenger to Churchill, and thereby initiate a peace process.

When Momm went to Berlin with the proposal in the autumn of 1943, he found a receptive audience in Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi chief of foreign intelligence. Schellenberg was already searching for ways of covert negotiation with the Allies, despite the fact that to do so was to risk execution by Hitler.

In retrospect, when Schellenberg was interrogated by the British after the German defeat, he indicated that he had hoped Chanel might at least give Churchill a message that senior German commanders were at odds with Hitler, and were seeking an end to the war. His strategy was to send her to Madrid to meet the British ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, with whom she was already acquainted. The mission was code-named Operation Modellhut ('model hat'); and for all the pantomime frothiness of the title, the participants appear to have embarked upon it with serious intent.

When Momm returned to Paris, the plan began to seem less clear; in part because Chanel wanted Vera Lombardi to accompany her to Madrid to deliver the letter to Hoare. Vera was now living in Rome - her husband was in hiding in southern Italy - and needed German authorisation to travel to Paris, and thence to Madrid. Her version of subsequent events is at odds with Chanel's, and it is impossible to be certain which of them was giving the more reliable account.

Vera described receiving a letter from Coco, delivered to her in Rome by a German officer, in which she asked Vera to return to Paris to help her reopen the House of Chanel. She declined the invitation, and three weeks later was arrested as a British spy; for this she blamed Chanel. But Chanel gave a different version, in which she had acted as a faithful friend to Vera, intervening on her behalf to gain her release from prison in Rome.

Whatever the correct interpretation of their motivations, the two women travelled to the British Embassy in Madrid together; once there, Vera was refused permission to leave Madrid and return to Italy. Her claims that she was a loyal British subject, and that Chanel was an enemy spy, seem not to have been given much credence by the British Embassy staff in Madrid, nor by Churchill's staff in London.

And when one examines the letter that Chanel wrote to Churchill from Madrid, it appears to be nothing more sinister than a straightforward appeal on Vera's behalf, to allow her to return home to Italy. Nor did it further the cause of Operation Modellhut, which was abandoned without ever really getting started.

The other account of these events is that of Schellenberg himself, as transcribed in the final Allied report of his prolonged interrogation after the war. If one is to believe Schellenberg, Chanel did not travel to Madrid but to Berlin. She was originally brought to his attention, he said, through Theodor Momm and one of Albert Speer's functionaries, SS-reopen Walter Schieber. 'This woman was referred to as a person who knew Churchill sufficiently to undertake political negotiations with him, as an enemy of Russia and as desirous of helping France and Germany whose destinies she believed to be closely linked together.' On Schellenberg's instructions, Chanel was 'brought to Berlin and she arrived in that city accompanied by a friend, a certain Herr [Hans] von Dincklage'.

According to Schellenberg, when he met Chanel - along with Dincklage, Momm and Schieber - it was agreed that 'A certain Frau Lombardi, a former British subject of good family then married to an Italian, should be released from internment in Italy and sent to Madrid as an intermediary.' The report of Schellenberg's interrogation continues: 'Lombardi's task would be to hand over a letter written by Chanel to the British Embassy officials in Madrid for onward transmission to Churchill. Dincklage was to act as a link between Lombardi in Madrid, Chanel in Paris and Schellenberg in Berlin.

'Accordingly a week later Lombardi was freed and sent by air to Madrid. On her arrival in that city, however, instead of carrying out the part that had been assigned to her she denounced all and sundry as German agents to the British authorities ... In view of this obvious failure, contact was immediately dropped with Chanel and Lombardi and Schellenberg does not know whether any communication was subsequently handed to Churchill through this woman.'

Malcolm Muggeridge, who had arrived in Paris as a British intelligence officer on the day of its Liberation in 1944, recalled subsequently having dinner with Chanel in her private apartment, and observed her with some fascination, in an encounter that was a curious combination of social visit and intelligence gathering for MI6.

He had been taken to rue Cambon 'by an old friend of hers, F, who had appeared in Paris, covered in gold braid, as a member of one of the numerous liaison missions which by now were roosting there'. His first impression of Chanel 'was of someone tiny and frail, who, if one puffed at her too hard, might easily just disintegrate …'

Yet as the evening progressed, he realised that for all the fragility of her appearance, Chanel was well able to defend herself. She gave no impression of uneasiness at the presence of an MI6 officer in her salon, and 'towards F she adopted an attitude of old familiarity, as though to say: "Don't imagine, my dear F, that your being dressed up in all that gold braid impresses me at all. I know you!"

'Nor had she, as a matter of fact, any cause for serious anxiety, having successfully withstood the first
épuration
assault [purges of collaborators] at the time of Liberation by one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general; she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for GIs, who thereupon queued up to get their bottles of Chanel No 5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head.

'Having thus gained a breathing space, she proceeded to look for help
à gauche et à droite
, and not in vain, thereby managing to avoid making even a token appearance among the gilded company on a collaborationist charge.' Afterwards, Muggeridge tried to draft some sort of report on Chanel, but realised that there was nothing to say, except that he was sure 'the
épuration
mills, however small they might grind, would never grind her - as indeed, proved to be the case'.

You could search forever for the whole truth about Gabrielle Chanel, and never find the last of the missing pieces; for when she cut up her history, she scattered it all around, losing some details, hiding others, covering her trail. Sometimes, you feel you might just catch up with her: in her apartment at rue Cambon; or in her upstairs studio, where Karl Lagerfeld now reigns, although her name is still on the door, as if barring anyone else from entering. The sign is just as she left it: 'Mademoiselle Privé'.

There is a manor house in the French countryside
, an hour or so by train beyond Paris, where Chanel's great-niece, Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie lives; a quiet place, hidden behind high walls and solid gates. Madame Labrunie is in her eighties now, but her face still contains clear traces of the girl she once was; the young girl carrying a bouquet of white flowers in the photograph that her great-aunt kept pinned by her dressing-table at the Ritz.

Now, Gabrielle Labrunie lives alone, but Mademoiselle is all around her. In her bedroom, there is a photograph of Chanel as a young woman, before she had cut her hair off; the long dark locks pinned up on her graceful head. In the living-room are rows of bookshelves filled with Chanel's first editions and her furniture still stands solid on the floor.

Gabrielle leads me along a corridor, to a simple room with a wooden wardrobe on one wall. She opens its door, gestures inside, and says, 'These are her clothes. You can try them on if you like.'

I put on a cream jacket trimmed with black braid, its narrowly cut sleeves elongating the arms, flattering the curve of the body, yet comfortable enough for me to raise my hands above my head. Then there is a fur-collared jacket in a pale natural-coloured wool, just as Mademoiselle recommended to others, but lined with a Japanese silk print, its black calligraphy unintelligible to my Western eyes, yet perfectly proportioned, repeated in minute detail over and over again.

I slide my hands into the pockets - 'The pockets are meant to be used,' Gabrielle reminds me, 'just like the buttonholes, never a button without a buttonhole, everything has its purpose' - and find a pair of ivory-coloured gloves inside. I take them out, and a faint scent emerges. 'Chanel No 5,' says Gabrielle, with a smile. 'Her gloves, her perfume - still here …'

I wish I could tell you that her scent still lingers in her rooms at the Ritz, but that would not be the truth. I was not sleeping in the Coco Chanel suite that overlooks the place Vendôme - its gilded grandeur a reminder of Chanel's pre-war years at the hotel, when the Duke of Westminster visited her here, as did Churchill and the Prince of Wales - but in the accommodation that she inhabited after the German invasion of Paris, and where she chose to remain in peacetime, a modest bedroom on the sixth floor.

Here she lay, night after night, alone as she grew older, albeit beneath the same roof as others; the Ritz a kind of secular monastery where the rich found refuge in the consolations of its quiet order; although Chanel's rest was often disturbed. In this bedroom I spoke to her friend Claude Delay who described to me what had taken place within these walls.

'I often found her alone,' said Delay, 'sitting at her dressing-table, gazing down into the garden, looking at the chestnut trees. She was still so slender, thin as a girl in her white pyjamas. "One shouldn't live alone," she'd say. "It's a mistake. I used to think I had to make my life on my own, but I was wrong."'

Mademoiselle Chanel was still attended by a retinue: a butler, François Mironnet; a maid, Céline, whom she called Jeanne (her mother's name); a secretary, Lilou Grumbach. Sometimes François took off his white gloves and sat down beside her to eat, to keep her company; or played cards with Lilou in the room adjacent to Mademoiselle, while she was falling asleep.

But she always came back to her quiet white bedroom at the Ritz; and when the day ended, when there was no one left for her to talk to, she would take her scissors from their place on the bedside table, cut her pills from their foil covering, and then give herself her nightly injection of Sedol, a form of morphine that she had relied upon for many years to help her sleep.

Yet the sleep it brought was not that of dreamless oblivion. In the darkness Chanel was troubled by nightmares, unbidden terrors, sleepwalking; sometimes she would rise from her bed, take her scissors from the bedside table, and sit in front of the mirror of her dressing-table, cutting at her pyjamas, jabbing and slashing at the cloth.

On the day before her death, 9 January 1971, Mademoiselle Chanel was still working, even though it was a Saturday, furiously racing against the clock to finish her latest couture collection. The following morning, she was forced to remain at rest; even the formidable Chanel could not insist that her employees go to work on a Sunday. Claude Delay came to visit her at the Ritz at one o'clock, where she found her sitting at her dressing-table again, applying her make-up, carefully drawing on her dark eyebrows and red lipstick, examining her reflection in the mirror.

They lunched together downstairs at Chanel's usual table and then, long after the room had emptied, the two women finally left for an afternoon drive. By the time the car brought them back to the Ritz, the sun had disappeared, and a full moon was rising. Delay said goodbye, and, as Chanel disappeared through the door of the Ritz, she called out that she would be working again at rue Cambon, as usual, the next day.

Mademoiselle Chanel took the lift back to her bedroom on the sixth floor, where her maid Céline was waiting for her. She was tired, she said to Céline, and lay down on her bed, still fully clothed, not wanting her maid to undress her. At about 8.30pm, she suddenly cried out to Céline that she couldn't breathe, asking her to open the window. The maid rushed to her mistress's bedside, trying to help her, as Chanel was struggling to give herself her injection. Céline broke the phial of drugs, and then Mademoiselle pushed the syringe into her hip. 'You see,' she said to Céline, 'this is how one dies.'

The next morning, Chanel's body lay in her white bedroom at the Ritz; her maid had dressed her in a white suit and blouse, and tucked her hands beneath the linen sheets. 'She looked very small,' says Delay, 'almost like a little girl taking her first communion.'

The funeral service was at L'Eglise de la Madeleine, the grandest church close to rue Cambon. Her coffin was set beneath the statue of Mary Magdalene, and covered with white flowers - camellias, gardenias, orchids, azaleas; some formed into a cross, others in the shape of scissors - except for a single wreath of red roses.

Yves Saint Laurent came to pay his respects, as did his fellow couturiers, Balmain, Balenciaga, Courrèges. So many of her friends and lovers were dead but Jeanne Moreau was at the church along with Salvador Dalí and all of her models, a long line of them, wearing immaculate couture.

Two weeks later, the same models appeared in Mademoiselle's last couture show, in ivory tweed suits and white evening dresses; many of those in the audience found their eyes drawn to the steps at the top of the mirrored staircase, where Mademoiselle used to sit, hidden from view; still hidden from them now.

'Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life' (HarperCollins, £25), by Justine Picardie, published on 16 September, is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515;
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